musical musings from the frozen north:
torontopia, mont royal city and kawartha kottages

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Germans

Just a quick note to link to this article I wrote on the Toronto band Germans in last week's Eye.

Being a self-loathing Kraut (my mother's maiden name is Kuntz, which might have something to do with it), my suspicions of a band called Germans were successfully allayed by this absolutely brilliant video. Even if you don't read the rest of this post, watch it now!

But these Germans have a lot more going for them, namely the fact that it's led by two fascinating local heroes. Leon Taheny is Final Fantasy's right hand man in the studio, and was also behind the boards for some of Ohbijou's lovely debut album. His latest gig is drumming for Sebastien Grainger (Death From Above 1979) in his new solo project, which is opening for Bloc Party this month. The other kaiser in Germans is Aidan Koper, who is not only a celebrated contortionist, but the chaotic keyboardist behind Oh No the Modulator, who were big favourites around the Brave New Waves office. Also involved are two members of We're Marching On and Michael Rozenberg of Better Than Everyone.

To my initial chagrin, all of them showed up for the interview. As a general rule, I try to never interview more than three people at once. Anything else descends into chaos, snippets of overlapping sentences, and very little I can use in an article.Because they're affable, entertaining and intelligent men, the beer-soaked conversation went far better than I expected. That said, it's not worth transcribing for you here. All the best quotes are in the article.